Most people know about the Kindle and the Sony eReader, but what about the iRex Iliad? No, I hadn’t come across it either, but it has a few interesting features:
but most importantly, and this could be especially interesting in certain professions:
I’d like to try one out…
Thanks to Steve de Gabrielle for the link
For anyone looking for a backup medium, rewritable Blu-ray drives are starting to become quite interesting. Dabs have an LG one for £160 now, and that includes VAT!
The disks are 25GB or 50GB and come in write-once or rewritable form, but since even the cheapest ones seem to start around £6, you wouldn’t want to have too many write-failures!
Watch those prices drop, though… it won’t be long.
Wow – this is a cool story!
Many thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.
I’ve always had very little luck with speech recognition systems. I don’t think my voice is that strange, but I’ve spent too much time on the phone trying to book flights and getting “I’m sorry I didn’t understand that. Please say yes or no” repeatedly as I try everything to make the blasted machine understand one simple word. Ah well.
Still, people tell me that Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Windows is getting really quite usable now, but there hasn’t been an equivalent package for the Mac. Until now, apparently.
MacSpeech Dictate (formerly iListen) has been rewritten to use the Dragon recognition engine, which is generally said to be the best on the market.
It’s not too cheap at $200 (though the price does include a microphone), and there’s no try-before-you-buy option, but if you want or need this, it might well be worth it.
The reviews on Amazon seem to suggest that people love it or hate it – if it works, the recognition quality is exceedingly good – some say even better than the Windows product – but if you want complex features, unusual vocabularies, or customer support from the company, it sounds as if it might be worth waiting. More here.
I met a jay the other day as I was picking up my bike at Cambridge station. A cheerful chap – he dodged most of my attempts to photograph him… as I crept up on him he would flutter up in the air, circle round behind me, and land there. I’d turn around and creep in that direction, and when I got almost close enough, he’d take off and land back behind me again.
We kept this up for a while, until he decided that a passing sycamore leaf was more interesting than me, and started teasing that instead, at which point I headed for home.
Roger McGuinn, partly in an effort to save some old folk tunes from being lost, has released a number of recordings for free at FolkDen.com, under a Creative Commons licence.
Many of them are really quite good, if you like that kind of thing. I keep finding myself humming Blow the Man Down after listening to his recording, for example. Recommended.
Following on from my previous post about dull politicians, I’m glad to see that Boris Johnson got off to a good start.
He denounced as ridiculous the lights at Trafalgar Square. “They are red for one minute 45 seconds and go green for only 12 seconds!” He vowed to fix this as the audience shouted “Yeah! Yeah!”.
It’s splendid stuff – more here. I only hope Sir Roderick Glossop doesn’t turn up and spoil the fun.
Mac users will appreciate these poster designs.
One of my favourite local cafes is more switched-on than I’d realised….
If you run any Ubuntu or Debian systems, or have users who do, you should read this if you don’t already know about the OpenSSL security bug. I fear it’s going to be important.
I’m one of those people who has no idea how many free texts I get on my phone, because I never get anywhere close to the limit.
It may be something to do with getting into the Blackberry thing early, so it’s always just been cheaper for me to send emails. Or it may be that I just never really like small keyboards, so while I read a great deal on my phone, I don’t write very much (despite my E61 having a nice QWERTY keyboard).
When I do want to send a text to someone, I often go to my laptop and right-click on their name in Address Book because it’s just so much easier to send it by Skype.
Anyway, what prompted me to post was the discovery that my mother is changing her phone plan because 100 texts a month aren’t enough for her. I probably don’t send that many in a year! So am I way uncool, or is it cooler not to be sending texts now that my Mum is being so prolific? How many texts do you send?
The latest product to use the DisplayLink technology is Samsung’s 2263DX, which is, I suppose, a monitor and a half.
I haven’t seen one in the flesh yet, but it looks cute. Ideal for buddy lists, twitter status, today’s calendar…
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